Seventy years ago, the beaches of Normandy were the site of an invasion never before seen in history. The largest armada ever assembled made a secret crossing of the English Channel to storm Nazi defenses and force an end to World War II.

On June 6, 1944, the Allied D-Day invasion of German-occupied France began.

Operation Overlord was the largest amphibious military action ever attempted. The armada comprised of 5,000 vessels and 11,000 airplanes ferried 150,000 service men across the English Channel. Nine battleships, 23 cruisers, 104 destroyers and 71 large landing craft were further assisted by minesweepers, merchantmen, troop transports and other small craft.

In the photo at top, Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the order of the day, “Full victory – nothing else” to paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division at the Royal Air Force base in Greenham Common, England, hours before the men boarded their planes to participate in the first assault wave.

Utah.

Omaha.

Gold.

Juno.

Sword.

The beaches of Normandy, code-named for the planned invasion, were littered with nasty defenses.

Nazi defenses on Normandy beach.

This photo, beach unnamed, shows the extent of Nazi defenses on the shore. As Eisenhower later described it, “Since the Germans had filled the beaches with terrible obstacles, steel traps of every kind and had mined them to make them even more difficult to remove, we had to have low water, low tide that would give us time to clear the obstacles or at least pile through them so our landing craft could come in.”

American soldiers land in France. (AP photo)

And land they did. Operation Overlord did not go exactly to plan, but was considered a success, gaining the Allied Forces a foothold in northern Europe. The losses were tremendous, with 9,000 Allied troops wounded or killed in the storming of the heavily fortified beaches. In the photo below, American troops whose landing craft was sunk help a comrade to the shore.

American soldiers make landing in France.

At home, the invasion was big news. In Denver, the large, rarely used typeface shouted the news from the front page of The Denver Post in an extra edition on June 6, 1944. At that time, the newspaper was published in the afternoon. Note the line of marching flags in the headline…

Front page news, June 6, 1944

On the 70th anniversary of such momentous human sacrifice, the dead, wounded and missing are remembered.